Demonology by Rick Moody Page B

he spoke at all itwas just to gripe at politicians. He was an independent, in terms of gripes. Just so you know. Non-partisan. And the only
     hair left on his ugly head, after all the worrying, was around those two patches just above his ears, just like if he were
     an ostrich chick himself. Because you know when they came out of the shell, these ostrich chicks looked like human fetuses.
     In fact, I’ve heard it said that a human being and an ostrich actually share forty-eight percent of their DNA, which is pretty
     much when you think about it. So Dad looked like an ostrich. Or maybe he looked like one of those cancer survivors from Golden
     Meadow Estates who were always saying they felt like a million bucks even though it was obvious that they felt like about
     a buck fifty. Mom, on the other hand, despite her bad business decisions, only seemed to get prettier and prettier. She still
     spent a couple of hours each morning making up her face with pencils and brushes in a color called
deadly nightshade,
    In terms of volume, one ostrich egg is the equivalent of two dozen of your regular eggs. It’s got two liters of liquefied
     muck in it. That means, if you’re a short order cook, that one of these ostrich eggs can last you a long time. A whole day,
     maybe. The ostrich shell is about the size of a regulation football, but it’s shaped just like the traditional chicken eggshell.
     Which is something I was told to say to tourists,
Note your traditional eggshell styling.
The ostrich egg is so perfect that it looks fake. The ostrich egg looks like it’s made out of plastic. In fact, maybe the
     guys who came up with plastics got the idea from looking at the perfection of the ostrich egg. Myself, I could barely eat
     one of those ostrich eggs without worrying about seeing a little ostrich fledgling in it, because it looked so much like a
     human fetus, or whatI imagined a human fetus looked like based on some pictures I’d seen in the
Golden Books Encyclopedia.
What if you accidentally ate one of the fledglings! Look out! They make pretty good French toast, though.
    Over the years, my dad had assembled an ostrich freak exhibition. There were lots of genetic things that could go wrong with
     an ostrich flock, like say an ostrich had four legs, or an ostrich had two heads, or the ostrich didn’t have any head at all,
     just a gigantic midsection. Maybe the number of genetic abnormalities in our stock had to do with how close the farm was to
     a dioxin-exuding paper plant, or maybe it was the chromium or the PCBs, whatever else. It was always something. The important
     part here is that the abnormalities made Dad sort of happy and enabled him to have a
collection
to take away from the Rancho Double Zero, and what’s the harm in that. Not a lot of room for me in the backseat, though,
     what with the eggs and the freaks.
    The restaurant we started wasn’t in Bidwell, because we had bad memories of Bidwell, after the foreclosure and all. There
     wasn’t much choice but to move farther out where things were cheaper. We landed in Pickleville, where it was real cheap, all
     right, and where there wasn’t anything to do. People used to kill feral cats in Pickleville. There was a bounty on them. Kids
     learned to obliterate any and all wildlife. Pickleville also had a train station where the out-of-state train stopped once
     a day. Mom figured what with the train station nearby there was a good chance that people would want to stop at a family-style
     restaurant. So it was a diner, Dizzy’s, which was the nickname we had given our ostrich chick
with two heads.
The design of our restaurant was like the traditional style of older diners, you know,shaped like a suppository, aluminum and chrome, jukeboxes at every booth. We lived out back. I was lucky. I got to go to a
     better school district and fraternize with a better class of kids who called me
hayseed
and accused me of intimate relations with brutes.
    My parents bought a